


four seasons (toward winter and back to spring)

by Kintatsujo



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra, Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/F, F/M, Future Fic, M/M, Mostly Canon Compliant, Multi, Reincarnation, kind of ignores the comics but mostly because I haven't been able to read them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-04
Updated: 2017-10-04
Packaged: 2019-01-08 23:04:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12263910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kintatsujo/pseuds/Kintatsujo
Summary: A history of a relationship from the outside.





	four seasons (toward winter and back to spring)

**Author's Note:**

> *whispers* the true OT3

/=O=\

 

Izumi wasn't actually surprised to find the three of them huddled together that morning after her mother's funeral, out on a bench in the Firelord's elaborate gardens, the sunrise summer bright. Her father seemed to have given his weight entirely to the Avatar and his wife, the scarred side of his face hidden against Aang's shoulder and neck, while Katara leaned against him on the other side and gently rubbed his shoulder.

Izumi was twelve, young enough to want the comfort and old enough to be unsure about interrupting them. She stood at the garden gate, unsure, for what felt like it must have been a solid five minutes, before Aang's eyes flickered to her. His sad smile drew her closer, and when she was guided around in front she was pulled into their embrace, into her father's lap, and Lord Zuko shifted his head from the Avatar's shoulder to bury his face in Izumi's hair.

And Izumi was grateful in her sorrow.

 

=o=

  
  
Izumi was sixteen before she managed to piece together all the hints and realized that her father's relationship with his two old friends had become... something she didn't quite have a name for. She wasn't entirely sure when it would have started, although in hindsight she felt that moment in the garden must have been a turning point. Not quite the start of it, no-- her father had grieved too deeply, and loved too deeply, to seek comfort in such a way. But... the beginning of a beginning, perhaps.

But the easy way Katara bumped his hip with hers, now, the halting forehead bumps with Aang that felt abortive somehow, and more importantly the alleged late night talks in her father's quarters that seemed to stretch until the wee hours and sometimes apparently ended with Aang and Katara sleeping on the couch in the sitting room-- well, Izumi had once chalked them up to the infrequency of their time with him, but now she was old enough to be wise to such things and young enough to foolishly wonder why she hadn't figured it out before.

She considered confronting him over it, but Izumi found she wasn't exactly angry, not enough to call talking to him about it a 'confrontation.' Her mother was not being replaced by Aang and Katara; Zuko had already loved them as his friends, and it genuinely felt like a preexisting relationship that had simply evolved. But at the same time she had to wonder if anyone else had picked up on it, and how people would react if it came out publicly that the Firelord was... intimately involved with the Avatar and his wife.

Izumi also considered whether she should tell their children; Bumi was closer to her in age and might have picked it up himself by now, although he'd clearly not chosen to say anything about it if he had. Kya was practically a baby, and Tenzin literally was, so it wasn't like she could say anything to THEM.

Should she bring it up with their other friends? Better not to risk it, right? If they didn't know, they weren't meant to, and if they did, they'd probably sorted it out before she had. Sokka was pretty smart, and Toph... Well, they probably knew, but Izumi still felt strange asking about it.

Probably, she thought, she should keep her own counsel on this matter. Her father had enjoyed little enough happiness in his life, that much Izumi knew, and if she said anything she knew she put this particular happiness at risk.

And her father didn't deserve to be lonely. Izumi felt that down to her core. There was a lot to the Firelord that Izumi understood-- and a great deal more that she didn't. He deserved the company of people who understood all of him, regardless of what form that company took.

 

=o=

 

Izumi was twenty and pregnant with her first child when her Great-Uncle(grandfather) Iroh passed on his sleep, and Izumi resolved that his name would live on with the first son she birthed. And she was even less surprised to find the three of them in the garden, much the same way she'd found them eight years before (only eight? It felt much longer).

She didn't intrude this time.

 

=o=

 

It seemed like she spent a lot of time throne-sitting in the years directly before Avatar Aang finally died. They'd known it was coming-- the incident with Yakone had sent Aang's health on a downhill slope that it sometimes seemed his body had been waiting to be pushed down. "Sometimes," Izumi's father said, "Abuse just builds up unseen, right before things shatter." Izumi worried he wasn't talking about Aang.

They scattered his ashes across the world, which Zuko and Katara both called _f_ _itting,_  as if there's anything but heartbreak here, to lose him at only sixty-six, which is too young to lose someone and yet too old to call too soon.

She inhaled through her teeth when she found them on a bench at Air Temple Island after the memorial, except now it's only her father sitting tall and Katara's face against his chest, shoulders shaking. The Firelord rubbed her back and whispered things Izumi could not hear.

Katara moved home to the South Pole, and it was generally agreed that regardless of _where_  they find the next Avatar, Katara will be the first master. Izumi wondered how she could stand the thought.

 

=o=

 

Fourteen years later, her father abdicated his throne to her to become "an ambassador of peace." And Izumi finally took up the nerve to ask him how many times he considered just moving to the South Pole himself.

Her father just smiled, the sort of sad smile that was probably answer enough.

"It just seems hard, the both of you choosing to be alone like that," she pressed.

Zuko shook his greyed head. "I've been alone, Firelord Izumi. I'm not alone now."

Izumi was fifty-six, and she still didn't quite understand her father sometimes.

 

=o=

 

It was more than six years later, and the world had been shattered and pieced together in ways Izumi couldn't have imagined when she'd ascended the throne, in big ways, and in little ways. The big ways were the main thing that occupied Izumi's working days, of course-- smoothing out relations with the spirits that had decided to move in to Fire Nation territories (and wasn't THAT interesting, especially when it turned out that some of them had been there all along and weren't especially pleased about the new spirits being unkind to the humans they'd apparently always claimed as their own), sending aid to the new Earth Provinces and acting as a diplomatic neutral voice between them, occasionally still doing the same for the two Water Tribes.

It was the small ways she couldn't escape from, though, especially now that the Avatar had publicly announced that she was in a formal courtship with Asami Sato-- which Izumi knew Korra had done because President Raiko had tried to convince her it was something to keep quiet about (she'd been there for that disastrous meeting).

Suddenly that kind of thing was being looked at differently, as "maybe this is okay, if it's something true of the Avatar."

Izumi knew that Korra couldn't _contact_  her past lives anymore, but she definitely wondered how much of this decision had actually been born from _Aang's_  frustrations in life. If maybe some deep part of Korra remembered, remembered that politics and prejudice had kept her past self from this kind of openness.

Especially considering the odd way Korra smiled when Zuko told her he planned to retire to the South Pole, now that the Avatar was in command of things and he was such, such an old man. The twist in her lips was like the twist in Aang's.

"You and Katara can take care of each other, then," she'd said, and sounded happy about it.

If Firelord Izumi had ever doubted her assessment of her father's relationship with Aang and Katara in the years after her mother's death, the surprised look on Korra's face after that slipped out of her mouth burned those doubts away.

 

=o=

 

About a year after the birth of Katara's third great-grandchild, the two of them slipped away in their sleep, side by side.

Izumi was grateful in her grief-- she didn't think she could have borne finding either Katara or Zuko grieving the other alone, sitting in some garden with no one left to support them.

 

=o=

 

About four years later Izumi realized that the set of the frown on Korra's adoptive daughter's face looked exactly like Zuko's, translated into a chubby cheeked child, and that the Avatar's adopted son's eyes sparkled exactly like Katara's.

 

\=O=/

**Author's Note:**

> I sort of assumed Izumi's mother was Mai when I watched LoK but took her name out of the places it originally showed up in the fic mostly to keep to the "mostly canon compliant" thing, just because as of writing this fic I'm pretty sure it still hasn't been confirmed one way or the other.
> 
> That said come on give me the polyamory.
> 
> (Go easy on me friends I just needed this out of my system a while ago and then took forever to post it)


End file.
